Tuesday morning.
Early morning traffic is frictionless, commuters float down I-95 S.
It’s 42° F. It’s January. Soft, light rain. Electronics somehow (?) sense that the windshield is damp, wipers flap intermittently. Miracle. All of it.
It’s quiet in the cabin.
No radio.
No talk shows.
No podcasts.
No playlists.
The soft hum of the engine. The shifting of the sole of my right shoe on the accelerator.
And, those pernicious bumpin’ Thoughts. [Read more…]
Where do they come from, thoughts?
Like wrens, out of the sky.
They arrive.
Noisy, hungry, perfectly themselves.
— Peter Behrens, from The Law of Dreams: A Novel
Notes:
I’m medicated. Two doses of NyQuil overnight, followed by a single dose of DayQuil. Smooth gel tablets roll in my palms. Floating. Is this Nepo’s half-wakeful state? Is this place the other name for Heaven?
Thursday. 7:30 am. Late jump. Traffic is flowing smoothly.
Head cold, congestion, body aches. Mucus draining in throat. What’s that smell of rot? Breath sweeter than a Honey Badger.
Day 3, no relief on horizon.
I tried to bow out of this speaking engagement earlier, you know, with that excuse of an important client meeting that conflicts on your calendar. Just couldn’t do it.
And to cancel now? At the last minute? Don’t feel well. Have the flu. Sorry. And leave them hanging with an empty 30 minute slot in a full day event planned months earlier. No, no, no. A burden too heavy to carry.
So, I begged down the engagement and they agreed. I’ll take 30 minutes of Q&A “on any topic.” [Read more…]
“I like things I can see as much as things I can’t (see)…that inner light was drawing me in.”
It was an innocuous line by Murakami in Killing Commendatore, but for some reason I couldn’t, I can’t, let it go.
And then it’s Baader-Meinhof. You are shopping for a new car, you fall in love with a particular model, and then suddenly you begin to see it everywhere. But the what is what I can’t see.
Murakami is followed by a passage I read by Immanuel Kant:
“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.”
And it’s early Saturday morning. Light rain.
I’m in bed, it’s dark out. The body is spent from the week. The Mind is off on its own, its finger tips touching, exploring, wandering, free, weightless. [Read more…]
Jon Wertheim: You use the word “thought spiral.” What does that mean?
John Green: The thing about a spiral is that it– it goes on forever, right? Like, if you zoom in on the spiral it can keep tightening forever. And that for me is the nature of obsessive thought that it’s this inwardly turning spiral that never actually has an end point. So it might be I’m eating a salad and it suddenly occurs to me that somebody might have bled into this salad. Now, they probably didn’t.
Jon Wertheim: This is what you’re thinking?
John Green: But this is what I’m thinking. And instead of being able to move on to a second thought, that thought just expands and expands and expands and expands. And then, I use compulsive behaviors to try to manage the worry and the overwhelmedness that that thought causes me.
~ John Green, 41, in a Sixty Minutes interview on October 7, 2018. “Reaching young adults and dealing with mental illness. The best-selling author of books like ‘The Fault in Our Stars,’ opens up to 60 Minutes about exploring his fears through his writing.”
His fourth solo novel, The Fault in Our Stars, debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list in January 2012 and was a best seller for three years. His most recent book, “Turtles All the Way Down,” has been a best-seller for 50 straight weeks since it debuted at number one. Its theme: obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD, based on Green’s own. For this book, he obeyed that time honored rule of the craft: write what you know.
John Green has:
Photo: John Green via Parade
the hour sinking into the emptiness of my
closed eyes
— Alejandra Pizarnik, from “the hour sinking,” The Galloping Hour: French Poems
Notes:
It’s like watching a zoo animal circle its cage.
For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms.
Even in a body’s most private moments, something else joins in.
~ Richard Powers, from “Trunk” in The Overstory: A Novel
Notes:
The mind is a hotel with a thousand rooms. When I tilt my head a certain way, I think about certain things. When I tilt my head another way, I think about other things. If I sleep on the right side of my face, for example, I’d dream of a pale rose, the future, or a continental diner in Passaic, New Jersey. When I sleep on the left side of my face, I’d dream that a hand is squeezing my heart, that I’m in prison, or that I’m watching hockey at an airport bar, about to miss a flight.
~ Linh Dinh, “The Mind” from All Around What Empties Out
Notes:
One of the Japanese words for mind is kokoro. The word koro is the onomatopoeia for “rolling along.” Something that rolls like a ball is koro koro koro. So kokoro is something that is always moving and changing, never stopped. There is no object or form that we can identify as mind. It is always changing. Though we are always looking for something to rely on, we cannot find it in something called mind.
~Shodo Harada, Not One Single Thing: A Commentary on the Platform Sutra
Notes:
AC: The self, which we worship at the moment, is actually a terrible prison. It’s a cage. You are trapped…When you get trapped in your own short term desires, it’s a cage…Maybe it’s good to escape from that daily grind of having to listen to your consciousness constantly saying that “I want this. I want this. I want this.” Which we are encouraged to believe is liberation…Maybe it’s not.
RB: I think you are quite right. Even pop spiritual orators such as Eckhart Tolle will say to you this incessant inner narrative, the relentless thinking – there’s no freedom in that. And watch where those thoughts take you. If I’m walking my dog in the field…this material reality is…I am a man, in a field with a dog. In my head what’s happening: “Oh God. Why did I do that for? This will probably go wrong. What’s going to happen?” …There is a self-imposed tyranny to that…
AC: People live inside their heads very much. Because they are encouraged to, that is the end point. But actually what’s going on in those heads are things that people don’t want to tell. Fear. Loneliness. Doubt. Because actually if you are going to be the right kind of individual, you mustn’t have that. You see that on social media at the moment…
RB: …Self is the relentless driven inner narrative…I myself have had to battle…I believe the disease of addiction has at its core a kind of circuitous self-centeredness that can only be ended, well first by removal of the initial substance…once those things are gone you recognize those drives are still present. What is it?! You become obsessed with food. You become obsessed with sex. You become obsessed with work and other people’s opinion. In the end you begin to recognize that the only way to end this circuitous torture of self-obsession is with ideas that have always been present in religious and spiritual doctrine, service, connection…in whose service is perfect freedom. It is so beautiful. You give yourself up…it is an idiom that implies that there is an upward transcendent trajectory.
~ Russell Brand, Is Civilization Crumbling? With Adam Curtis. (Under the Skin. With Russell Brand. Podcast #50, March 24, 2018)
